Head in the Sand

Paul "Scoop" Waugh at The Standard

has what could potentially come a big headache for Brown:

"Gordon Brown ignored a stark warning that "toxic" bank loans could lead to global financial collapse, a leading US hedge fund chief has revealed.

Jim Chanos said that Mr Brown, while Chancellor of the Exchequer, was given a briefing that predicted banks were in dire danger - more than a year before the crisis hit last year."

Cheers Gordon.

Image via

The Rascal

Banter:

Tip of the hat to

Holyrood Patter

for this one.

Things Can Only Get Better...

Well it wouldn't be hard to beat this:



Clue number one to some conference fun TB has planned...

The Sound of Music

This is awesome:



Via

Trixy

In Out of the Loop

TB has blundered. Apparently CF has recently appointed a full time member of staff, working out of CCHQ. In light of his recent post it seems the time has come when no one ever tells him anything. That's what he gets for going away for weeks on end. His post did however have the interests of the organisation at heart.

Given the great things he is heard and some of the freshers stuff he saw tonight, it sounds like that Kate Fuller is doing a wonderful job. TB has been there and knows how hard the freshers campaign is, and it is particularly heartening to hear that the CF members database is being conquered.

Kate there is a TB bag-for-life in the post. Keep up the good work.

Please can TB have one of those Party for Change t-shirts he understands are going out?

Sister Bear hits the Blogosphere

Sister Bear has started blogging for the Spectator's new

Cappuccino Culture

blog. TB has been trying to get her to start a blog for ages but seems she has gone straight for the big league!

Read her musings

here

.

It stinks...

A few weeks back the Sunday Times nodded to the fact that Mandelson had met with David Geffen in Corfu, and surprise surprise the Government are now proposing draconian changes to how they counter file sharing. Apart from a bit of follow up on some blogs, TB included, the story went pretty much under the radar.

A few people dismissed TB pushing the story hard as idiotic and deluded, tin foil hat nutter etc...

Well finally the Lobby have

started to listen

.

Better late than never boys.

Prison Works?

Scottish Labour blogger, and Holyrood gossiper

Yapping Yousuf

had this little snippet of intrigue yesterday:

"Apparently Megrahis former inmates at Greenock prison are fuming as Gadaffi had previously paid to give Megrahi Sky TV in his room and under the rules of the prison if one inmate receives a facility then they all get it so everyone was enjoying SKY TV until now."

WTF? Excuse TB while he goes a little hang em' and flog em' but who the hell allowed the Libyan President to pay for Scottish murders and rapists to watch endless repeats of Top Gear on UK Gold?

Surely, by the same rules, every single life prisoner in Scotland who gets cancer will be let out?

No? Didn't think so.

Young, Rich and err Green

Given that the Conservative Future executive are currently deliberating over the co-option of three new members in the run up to the election, TB got a thinking...

Apparently the response to the recruitment drive has been top notch with the current Exec having a wealth of candidates to choose from for the three new roles. This is all in spite of it being a completely unpaid position, without provision for as much as a train fare. Both Labour and the Liberal Democrats have paid up staffers running their youth operations, but not the Tories...

And now it seems so

do the Greens

:

The Young Greens are recruiting a new Co-ordinator. The post is 7 hours per week to be carried our over 1 full day or 2 half days and is based in North London at Green Party head office plus occasional travel/weekends away in the UK. You will be line managed by Young Greens' Chairs and Green Party Head of Office. Salary pro rata is c.£17,500.

This is ridiculous. The Conservatives cannot simply rely on the momentum behind them in order to run and recruit to its youth movement. Yes of course this helps, but at the end of the day, deep down, everyone knows that Conservative Future could be a much greater machine and aid the main party to a much, much greater extent.

When what is essentially a pressure group with lofty ideas of grandeur can afford to have a paid youth staffer, then surely the party that is set to form the next government, with the most money coming in, must concede that there is some merit to the idea?

Anyone? No...? Anyone...?

More Guardian nonsense...

Dear Peter Jones,

You are a moron of the highest order

. Come the counter revolution you have my written word that you will be the absolute first against the wall.

Lots of love

Tory Bear

Gordon's Alive...

Brown managed to

find time to congratulate

our cricketing heroes but not a squeak about a scandal that could potentially bring down his government.

Quote of the Day

TB was chatting to some people while MacAskill was giving his ridiculous justifications for releasing a mass murderer. A certain silver fox piped up with this absolute gem:

"I can't believe they clap in the Scottish Parliament. It's like a student union."

So true. On so many levels.

Oh no she didn't...

...oh yes

she did

.

Home Sweet Home.

After a fairly mammoth drive from the south of France, TB came out of the tunnel to the last half hour of the cricket. He has just got home for the first time in five weeks and was greeted to these two great images when he sat down to check his email.

Brown is in deep shit

, well done to

Drudge

for highlighting this to his millions and millions of American readers. After three fantastic weeks in the US, where conservative politics is done properly and two blissful weeks in the south of France, as well as the pending real world TB has to face, coming back to the UK was quite hard work, but what great news to come back to. Brown is on the rack again, the SNP have destroyed any semblance of credibility they once had (no confidence vote in Holyrood anyone?) and England have won the Ashes.

It's time for the Conservatives to seal the deal, it's nearly conference season. Labour's will be a bloodbath but the Tories cannot just sit back and watch. Apologies for the quiet blogging of the last few weeks, but panic not...

Things are going to get very interesting again, very quickly.

Something for the weekend...

TB is going to be in transit for most of the weekend driving back from France, so he will be rather quiet. In the meantime here are some of the long awaited pictures from the

Young America's Foundation

conference in DC a few weeks back. Seems Tory Bear has a whole legion of new fans, including Kate Obenshain of Fox News fame...

American girlies, if you fancy coming to the

Young Britons' Foundation

conference in October then you should probably take a look at

this

.

Get writing those essays if you want to see see the bear again...

Brown and Out

When it comes to this...

Dear Prime Minister,

The decision by the Scottish Justice Secretary to release Mr al-Megrahi on compassionate grounds has been widely condemned, including by President Obama.

As I said yesterday, I believe that the decision to release Megrahi was wrong. He was convicted of murdering 270 people, and I do not believe he deserved to be released on compassionate grounds, or returned to Libya.

The scenes of him receiving a rapturous welcome at Tripoli airport on his return will have distressed many people. I note that Colonel Gaddafi’s son has now publicly thanked not just the Scottish authorities but the British Government for its stance, raising questions about the British Government’s role

You have not commented on the decision since it was announced yesterday. This morning your Foreign Secretary refused several requests to say what he thought of the Scottish Justice Secretary’s decision.

The fact that the decision to release was taken by the Scottish Justice Secretary does not preclude you, as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, from now expressing your opinion on a subject that is of great public concern, and which affects Britain’s international reputation and our relations with our allies.

It is curious that while others have commented, Britain’s own Prime Minister has not.

I hope you will now take the opportunity to do so.

We are entitled to know what you and your Ministers have said to the Libyan authorities on this matter, and to the Scottish Justice Secretary.

Above all, I believe that the public are entitled to know what you think of the decision to release Megrahi, and whether you consider it was right or wrong.

I hope you will now take the opportunity to make your own view clear.

David Cameron

..you know the Prime Minister is a disgrace.

The grumbling is starting again...

This Observer isn't very happy

with Conservative Future and has some interesting words of encouragement that could be paraphrased with "kick" "up" and "backside":

"Since I joined the party in February, I have had precisely nil contact from Conservative Future. Indeed, had I not been an avid reader of political blogs I would not even have known that the organisation exists.

If the party genuinely wants to engage young people with politics. If it goes to all the bother (and presumably expense) of setting up a youth organisation to achieve just that, then it really should be making sure that everyone can get involved.

Doing that wouldn't be hard. All it means is regular e-mail updates to eligible CF members. It wouldn't cost much and the extra numbers of campaigning young people that might end up on the streets as a result could be huge."

Looking forward to hearing who the new co-options onto the National Exec for the election campaign are. They need to hit the ground running and instill some much needed energy into a exec that has been going close to 18 months now.

Nominations have closed and the selection process is apparently underway. TB has been assured it is completely independent of CCHQ, which fingers crossed means we might get some sound people.

You'll know when he knows.

It's not the doctors that are evil...

Seems

Comrade Blaney

has been taking photoshop tutorials.

Totty Watch: Lady Kitty Spencer Editon

After the rage of the last couple of posts, it's definitely time for some light relief.

Mandrake

reports today that top totty Lady Kitty Spencer, niece of Diana, wants "to write - I was actually thinking about doing political journalism before. I like the idea of being like a Carrie Bradshaw from Sex and the City, but who writes about serious things."

It's an open secret that TB is a Sex in the City fan, (yes he's seen every episode, whatya gonna do about it!?) There is a serious lack of political lady-bloggers. Where is the blogosphere's political Carrie? Maybe Kitty should fill the gap...

TB would be happy to show her the ropes.

Nationalist Scum.

Fraser Nelson wrote in

today's Speccie

about the growing closeness between the tories and their anti-labour "mercenaries" - the SNP in North Briton. It's a must read, but

developments today

might put a little strain on that relationship. As nice as some of them are for a pint or a bit of banter, the Lockerbie decision reminds us all of what dangerous and deluded fools the Scottish nationalists really are.

What do you expect when you elect what should be no more than a lunatic-fringe pressure group to run a region. The Scottish Executive have embarrassed themselves today. The UK as a whole has been shamed by a jumped up county council. The scumbag terrorist should have been left to rot in pieces, thinking about the hundreds of innocent lives he ended and families he destroyed. Compassion isn't a word he ever used. The shameful political opportunism - honed down to the very last second, with MacAskill timing his speech, just a couple of minutes past the hour in order to guarantee American television coverage, was just so blatent. This wasn't about compassion, it was a cold and cynical calculated political move. The last refuge of the scoundrel indeed.

The SNP may think they have scored a victory here, no doubt Salmond will be troughing a celebratory curry tonight, but in the long run this will come back to bite them in the arse. They have shown to the whole world that they are amateurs, way out of their depth, proving what we had all long suspected. They have set the agenda back years, we have solid proof now that they should not be in a position of power.

Every cloud eh?